S, the annual open access journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (CLiC), publishes original articles in Lacanian studies and related topics in art, film and literary criticism, philosophy, and political critiques. The journal also republishes, with permission, difficult to obtain essays and translations from prominent Lacanian writers. Issues of the journal contain some or all of the following sections: Articles, Book Reviews, Dialogues, Editorials, Interventions from the Clinic, General Articles, and Comedy Dossier.

Each issue of S is arranged around a theme. The most recent issue available at the time of this review is Volume 6/7, for 2014, and its title is Comedy and Catastrophe. It contains five articles in the Comedy Dossier section (“After Catastrophe: From Beckett to Žižek,” “Lacanian Laughter and Bragging in 1598,” “A Comedy of Horrors: On Humor, Escapism, Despair, the Uncanny and Comedy’s Happily Horrible Hierophany,” “Too Early, Too Late: Fetishism, Melancholia and Mourning the GDR in Good Bye Lenin!,” and “Between Genet’s Bordello and Holy Communion: Lacan on Comedy in Seminar V”) and the two General Articles, “Journey to the End of Ideology: Ideology and Jouissance in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night” and “Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis Under Conditions of Material Pirating and Borrowed Time.” The issue previous to that, Volume 5 for 2012, was on the special topic, Topology, and contained the editorial, “Topology and the Inscription of the Clinic,” along with four Articles (“A Method of Reading a Knot,” “Generalized Placement: Elements of Analytic Knot Theory,” “Topological Objects and the Current State of Mathematics,” and “A Year in the Company of Knots”), two Dialogues (“Homology: Marx and Lacan” and “From Representation to Class Struggle: A Response”), and an Intervention from the Clinic (“Current Controversies in the Treatment of Autism in France”).

There is material here that will be of interest to psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, semioticians, linguists, philosophers, artists, mathematicians, political scientists, gender and sexuality scholars, theologians, and sociologists, to name but a few. The writing is usually complex (like Lacan) but anyone interested in Lacan’s writings and annual Seminars will want to know about this title.